For those two days rumours circulated that her father’s acquaintances or local drug dealers were to blame.

But the accused was not linked to the family, nor was the alleged kidnapping related to drugs.

He is known to police and has previously been charged with a child-sex offence, but the charges were dropped.

The innocent blonde child comes from a low socio-economic family that lives in a house of disrepair.

The simply dressed father was known for wandering around town without shoes.

Police inspect a house as part of their investigation.

The little girl’s mother was known for chastising her young daughters in public. As the hours of the girl’s disappearance wore on and investigations intensified, suspicions surfaced, even within the family’s circle of friends, that something else was at play.

But the rumours were unfounded and the family was thrust into the media spotlight.

They became the victims of a random crime that is every parent’s worst nightmare.

But in the swirling eddy of rumour and gossip, police kept their minds open and stated so on several occasions.

They could not afford to fall into the same trap.

The streets of Childers. Photo: Paul Beutel.

“I think it’s important that we keep an open mind regarding motivation,” Detective Inspector Bruce McNab told the media the day before a man was arrested.

“We have to investigate every piece of information we receive no matter how trivial and follow it to its logical conclusion.

“That’s the only way we, the police, and the people of Childers are going to know who took (the young girl) and that it’s not going to happen again.”

In the end, police allege the arrest of a 45-year-old man came down to a fingerprint on a frame at the girl’s house.

Scores of tip-offs, leads and interviews did not unearth the accused.

The man was arrested on Tuesday morning and charged that night.

Situated on the Bruce Highway, about 300km north of Brisbane, Childers is a town where big crimes rarely happen.

A backpacker hostel fire that killed 15 people in 2000 gave it tragic notoriety, but since then police have dealt mainly with traffic offences, petty crime and minor drug cases. A robbery at the Caltex petrol station earlier this year was “right out of character” for the region, according to the officer in charge, Sergeant Geoff Fay, a Childers resident since 1998.

“It’s a good, friendly town to bring your kids up in,” Sgt Fay said.

“We had Neighbourhood Watch in the past but they sort of fell away because there was nothing to report.”

Sgt Fay said Childers had a drug element similar to most rural towns. When the six local cops were not occupied with road and traffic offences, they occasionally conducted narcotic raids.

“There is an element in town, there are people that we’re well aware of (who) supply drugs,” he said.

Some residents have installed their own security cameras for protection.

Parents carefully pick and choose whose homes they will allow their children to visit.

They don’t allow their children to walk the streets unaccompanied.

One friend of the little girl’s family described a local drug supplier as a “close friend” of the girl’s parents and incorrectly suspected he was involved in the girl’s snatching.

This led to many people jumping to the conclusion that drugs were entwined in the disappearance, and one media outlet falsely reported that the abduction was connected to a drug deal.

Facebook, the social media forum often used for public venting, was bombarded by unjustified calls for the couple’s four children, aged 5 months to 7 years, to be taken away from them.

At the close of a trying week, after the arrest, the girl’s parents held on to each other and walked the streets of Childers as though lost in a wilderness.

Their secluded existence in a quiet pocket of Queensland had been exposed to the nation.

Somehow they had to find a way to return to normal life.

A close friend said people had been too quick to judge, when in reality a much more sinister evil could have been lurking on the fringes of town, right under everyone’s noses.

“It shows what sort of people are actually out there,” he said.

“It might wake a few people up in this town not to judge people without having any solid evidence.”

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